It
started with a pair of desert boots I begged for seventh grade
Christmasthat arrived weeks after everyone stopped wearing
them. I know. I was spoiled.A billion people in
China were desert-bootless-- I didn't care. My mother
started wearing them around the house, then for short trips
to town.

Soon she added my discarded denim bell bottoms
with red pinstripes, my leather beltwith the dancing bears
buckle. My teen years were haunted by mismatched
versionsof my old selves-- my mother's pale, smiling face
perched on top. I triedhiding my old clothes at school,
but she found them. I gave them to Goodwill

but she
bought them. Even after I moved out, married, had children,
I never knew what mishmash of my old tie-dyed T-shirts, disco
shoes, madras shorts or wide-collared floral shirts would
show up at Christmas or Fourth of July along with news of
more successful classmates and clip ped obits of neighbors I
never knew I'd known.

I soak my old clothes in gasoline
now; burn them on the darkest night of the month while I
strip naked and howl. For a moment I am free.

After
Dinner One August

We
found the dinosaur bones in the swamp behind Alec's house.The
first bones, they must have been forelegs, made great
swords,clacking sharply with each collision, whistling when
swung overhead.

The skull, almost intact and big enough
for Alec to crawl inside, echoedto his chants I
am the dinosaur's brain
while Felix and I laughed.The ribs, after a little digging,
rose out of the muck like a giant clawringing sharply in the
twilight when Felix banged them with the foreleg.

Alec
rapped the skull with small stones and I blewinto a
horn-shaped skin (it must have been a claw).The moon rose and
clouds blew off the black, black sky.

Alec bellowed and we
hooted and cawed until Alec's momyelled from atop the stone
wall at the edge of his yard: Hey!
and
silencedraped the night like a magician's cape.
How
would you like it,
she saidif
dinosaurs dug up your bones and started playing with them?
I thoughtif
I threw the claw like a dagger, I could take out her-- but I lost
my nerve. Now,
she
said, start
burying them. When I get back I want everything as it was.She jumped off the wall, disappeared into the darkness and we
went to work.

Hail began to rain on us, tinging off the
bones, dinging off our heads. By the time we'd finished
and rushed inside, a layer of mini white meteors covered
everything. I moved that spring. When I drove back
years later they were gone: Alec, the house, the swamp, the
bones.

Jack
Powers teaches
writing, English, special education and math at Joel Barlow High
School in Redding, CT. He is also co-director of Barlow's
Writing Center. Powers has a BFA in Painting from Syracuse
University, an MS in Special Education from Southern Connecticut
State University, and MFAs in Fiction and in Poetry from Sarah
Lawrence College. He has also studied writing with the
Connecticut Writing Project - Fairfield and in writing groups,
including one that has met for over twenty years. He has poems
appearing or forthcoming in Atlanta
Review, The Ledge, Connecticut River Review and
The
Cortland Review.